1
Ruby tapped her toe in time with the theme music of her favorite anime as it pumped through her bulky headphones. No silly earbuds for her, nope. When it came to tech she always craved the most powerful, top-of-the-line shit. Her fingers flew over her keyboard and her eyes darted from line to line of code flying past on the bank of a dozen monitors arranged around her in three layer semi-circle. There in the Shields command center—manning the supercomputer brains of their operation—she was in her happy place, surrounded by zeros and ones that painted a whole new reality away from the physical world.
She probably should have taken her friends up on a night out, but she knew Kennedy, Sola, and Laurel were looking forward to hanging out with their guys in the downtime between missions. And by hanging out she meant they were being spoiled to death in bed considering the three women had six boyfriends between them. And Ruby couldn’t even find one!
Okay, so she’d have to leave her beloved mega-computer to land a guy. That felt like a lot of effort and she preferred her fuzzy Kurama character slippers to heels.
That didn’t mean she didn’t get lonely at times like this, when the rest of her team, who’d also become a cross between friends and family, had retreated to their own quarters upstairs for the night. Soon she’d switch to her personal workstation but her apartment seemed awfully isolated lately. Especially when her two smoking hot neighbors decided to get it on. Her fancy headphones muffled their moans, but it couldn’t stop the wall between their apartments from quaking as they fucked against it.
Ruby swiped between applications, her palms growing a bit sweaty as she recalled the thuds, groans, and other noises penetrating the divider between their living spaces. She was certain Ace and Liam didn’t realize she was aware they went at it most times they were alone together for more than five minutes. Nor did they have a clue about how many nights she’d pleasured herself while eavesdropping on them like a creeper or after waking from one of the wicked dreams they’d inspired her to have more and more often lately.
She fanned her face, then attempted to distract herself by checking out the upcoming House of Goblins NFT launch. Of course, she wasn’t satisfied with public information. If Ruby dug a little deeper into the identities behind the online profiles posting the digital artwork for sale and their other holdings, she figured she was only doing her due diligence before investing in their work. Her recent obsession with similar projects had already padded her bank account quite nicely.
Ruby calculated an estimate of how much it would take to win the auction, as she’d fallen in love with the dumb animation of a cartoon zombie cat. What was the point of adult money if she couldn’t spend it on shit like that? Huh?
She happened to be staring at a section of the blockchain ledger, debating her options, when it flickered. She blinked and…something changed. She hissed, “What. The. Fuck.”
After scrubbing her eyes, Ruby tapped a few keys, engaging a security feature of the Shields system that archived automatic snapshots. She flung a recent screen capture up on a monitor and drew the blockchain code to the one next to it so she could compare them side by side. She wasn’t losing it. They were different. The blockchain had been altered. That was…impossible. Or should have been.
An icy chill raced down her spine, making her sit up straight. She leaned in, her fingers tap dancing across her keyboard as she investigated. Her heart pounded harder and faster than the thumping Ace and Liam inflicted on her poor wall night after night. She wasn’t sure she even remembered to breathe.
So a double tap on her shoulder shattered her concentration. The unexpected sensation would have rocketed her out of the fancy black leather gaming chair with purple trim she’d insisted their office manager, James, buy for her workstation, except she was tethered to the desk by her damn headphone cord.
Ruby screeched and jerked back, her neck contorting when the cable reached its limit.
“Sorry!” Liam hovered over her as if her earlier thoughts had conjured him. And where he was, Ace was never far behind. He sidled up beside his partner at Shields…and at home. The assessing stare from his gold eyes roved over her face, which could have probably rivaled a gallon of milk for its whiteness right then. “It’s late. Everything okay?”
Ruby couldn’t speak. Dizzy from the blood leaching from her cheeks and the terror coursing through her, she blinked her watery eyes furiously, then stammered, “Sure. Fine. Everything’s peachy. Sorry, guys, but I need to concentrate right now.”
Though she usually had a hard time peeling her hopefully not-too-blatant stare from Liam’s tall, thick frame, or the tattoos winding seductively around Ace’s recently healed forearm and neck, right then all she could do was gawk at the evidence in front of her.
“On what?” Liam leaned in as if anything on her screen would make sense to him. How could it when it didn’t compute for her?
Ruby canted her head like a confused dog and refreshed her screen a few times but the anomaly persisted.
“I’m not sure… I was increasing my staking positions of various crypto because House of Goblins is releasing an NFT I wanted to get in on and I noticed something weird with the blockchain.” She rambled mindlessly as she tried to figure out what the hell had just happened.
“What’s blockchain?” Ace asked.
“It’s the foundation for cryptocurrencies.” She wrestled her annoyance as she filled them in on the most basic fundamentals while she tried to solve a complex problem.
“And NFT stands for…?” Liam wondered.
“Non-fungible token.” Ruby spoke on autopilot as she continued to probe the faulty code and look for a way to fix it. Or uncover some clue as to who had tampered with it. She jammed her digital fingers into every nook and cranny she could find, downloading as much of her findings as possible to study later as she went. “It’s digital art. Potentially very valuable if you get in early and sell to the right person.”
“Damn, Ruby. You’re so fucking smart, you make me feel like I’ve got rocks for brains.” The weight of the gazes Liam and Ace were exchanging over her head pressed down on her. They probably thought she was a weirdo to be so into what she was doing. They had no idea how screwed she was and the size of the can of worms she’d inadvertently opened.
“I’m not. I’m a fucking idiot. Because while my transaction was processing, I was digging around on the creators to see what I could find out and decide if this was going to be a good investment, which is a little bit of a no-no.” Ruby began to rock as she filled them in on the tiniest hint of how horribly this had just gone. It wasn’t like she’d been intending to dox anyone. She was naturally curious and often poked around where…technically…she wasn’t supposed to. While it had gotten her wrist slapped a few times, nothing awful had ever come of it. She was too damn good for that.
Except tonight, she’d met her match. And then some.
“I see.” Of all the Shields, Ace would probably be the one to understand best. He had a reputation for doing some reckless shit, even on assignment. Which was probably why Liam watched him like a hawk in the field. Especially since he’d gotten hurt during the operation where Marcus and Kennedy had found Knox.
As she attempted to draw one ragged breath after another through her chattering teeth, someone took control of her computer without tripping any of her breach alerts. Her mouse moved and it wasn’t because of her trembling fingers. Whoever was driving her machine began to erase screenshots even as she flew into action double checking the security of their archives and making sure the invaders couldn’t move beyond her terminal to the network where duplicates had automatically been saved. It was worse than she’d imagined.Holy shit!
“You pissed someone off?” Liam grew more serious and crouched beside her, his concern wrapping around her like a warm blanket though it couldn’t reach her core, frozen by dread. “Are you in trouble?”
“So. Much.” Ruby bit her lower lip. “Look. You should go. Forget you saw me in here and that we had this conversation. This is…bad.Reallybad.”